


Meet Me Where the Tide Goes Out

by eggjam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mermaid, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Interspecies War, Magic Science, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Xeno, slight dub-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-14
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-05 08:55:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggjam/pseuds/eggjam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His ears were made for water things, climbing bubbles spilled from air pockets and vents in the ocean floor and mourning whale song from far away, so when he heard the land thing, a shallow scream waning on the quiet surrender of a splash, he had no idea what he was hearing. He investigated out of curiosity, pulled along the broken road of silent white sand and black kelp by the irresistible call of the unfamiliar. That he saved a life was not intentional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What Brittle Thing

 

_What brittle thing_

_did I find in dream?_

_Who came like frost_

_and left like steam._

_And oh_

_what reap did I sow?_

 

The world he knew was a place of blue ripple glass that waited and covered. Its warmth was punctuated with its cold, and when the Old World ended in a calamitous rain of fire and stones, earthquakes and ice ages, it was appropriate that there was where life retreated - into the sea, the endless expanse of roiling waves which blanketed the surface of the Earth when the ice caps melted and the continents broke apart in malleable chunks that eroded and sifted to the bottoms of bottomless trenches. It was adaptation, evolution, surrender - finally - to forces beyond the reckoning or ability of mankind. Humans were good at change; it was what they were made of and for and from, but that was why they were not human anymore.

Ironically, he thought, the meteoric destruction of the planet face was probably better for the Earth in the long run, given the things he'd read in the preserved old books he'd discovered digging around ancient ruins and what he could glean from the archives in the library. People, Old World people, had refined killing and ruining to an art which was almost poetic. Some of it had been funny to read, or it had been sad, but some of it hadn't surprised him in the least when he looked around at what their civilization had become: a violent, warring race of people led by a bloodthirsty sea witch eager to escape. A cool million years after the end of the Old World, and the gulfa were ready to ascend back to the surface, what was left of it.

He only thought it was stupid.

Life was all it would ever be again, and she should have known better, but no. The empress of the gulfa, Her Imperial Condescension, ambitious, old as the sea, and willfully ignorant as always was looking for a way to get back up top and further than that if the rumors he'd heard in the city center were true. Rumors that he had to listen hard for because even whispering her name was dangerous. That this plan involved sending her people on long, tireless searches scouring the deepest black canyons for the monstrous horror terrors who could give her what she wanted meant nothing to her. That some of her people would die because not even their evolved swim bladders could protect them from the intense pressure at the bottom of those pits or be hunted and eaten by the eldritch beasts that lurked in the gloom of the uncharted waters meant little and less. She wanted power and expansion, and she was tired of cowering in the luminous purple shade of the Great Reef City, constantly fending off the sharks and giant eels that preyed on them. The gulfa people themselves had no desire to return to the surface, something he also heard in whispers. No amount of time would ever pass which would erase the memory of what had happened to the Old World or what had happened in it for that matter. Most of the stories that had been passed down were, he was sure, convoluted and eroded from time, and still they were grisly enough to make him wary of making deals with the devil just to return to a way of life like that. Whatever remained of the desolate planet face was not worth it, but Heaven forbid anyone try to convince her of that. Certainly not himself.

He was fortunate enough to have an older brother who amused The Condesce, which won him favor on its own, and he was fortunate enough to have been born with a genius knack for technology, robotics of the Old World applied and made workable under water, which amused as well as intrigued her, so she gave him space and resources to tinker and do as he liked, but in return employed him as her private pet. His chief duty as her pet was to keep her 'comfortable,' and on her darker, more restless days that made his skin crawl, but mostly she sent him exploring in the ruins of the Old World. Salt and petrification had kept intact many of the artifacts that he found, entire cities preserved as stone under the water, and the scant numbers and unwillingness of the gulfa to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors by building sprawling metropolises had left the spoils mostly untouched.

He built a number of robots specifically to assist him on his expeditions, found things in trunks, still-dry things that surprised him, and other odds and ends that he mostly gave The Condesce to please her. What he wanted was not old, unusable baubles and relics. He liked the books, the parts, and the funny kind of cultural detritus that he couldn't make heads or tails of. Once, he'd cracked a mud shell and found an hard, clear-plastic case full of brightly-colored sticks with the painted heads of creatures he had never seen the likes of before. They were all branded on the side with 'PEZ,' and he took them home without showing anyone to clean the case and mount the PEZ on his wall beside the other things he'd dug up over the years. His brother secretly shared his indulgence and would often take his place keeping The Condesce 'comfortable' so that he could go out and find more odd treasures for their hive.

The light shifted the water in oranges and silvers, and he turned his eyes up to measure the lengths of their dance, estimating that the day was nearly done with still more ground left to cover before he could comfortably take shelter. His chief duty was not his only duty, and he had been commissioned to an end this time. One of the two robots he'd brought with him was beginning to stall, and he knew he'd have to stop soon anyway. Its salt filter was clogged, and it needed a cleaning as soon as he found a cavern or a big enough reef to rest in. The water was shallow, and he wasn't worried about the monsters of the deeps or even the things that attacked the city, but there were always predators to be careful of, and it clear, shallow water, his scales were a glittering orange target.

"Brobot." The larger of the two drifted forward to meet him, red visor shimmering an acknowledgment. "Scan the area for shelter. If you can, get us out of the clear. We're exposed." It whirred and sped off, and he slid his pack from his shoulders, already looking back to his other bot, gathering tools to pry off its front panel. It was while he was busy searching through its chest cavity, moving wires around to get at the filter's connectors, that he heard it. He stopped, fingers going still and quiet so he could listen, and after a stretch of silence, it came again.

His ears were made for water things, climbing bubbles spilled from air pocket and vents in the ocean floor and mourning whale song from far away, so when he heard the land thing, a shallow scream waning on the quiet surrender of a splash, he had no idea what he was hearing. He felt the disturbed rush of the water, the waves uncalm around and above him, and he knew something had fallen into the deeps. His hands worked to quickly shove his things in his pack and close the lid on the robot. "Lil Cal, weapons mode," he said, and slower than he was comfortable with it changed the shape of its arm, narrowing the edges into a long, flat blade. Even if he hadn't been eager to move just to get his muscles ready for a possible fight, he wanted to investigate out of curiosity, pulled along the broken road of white sand and white coral by the irresistible call of the unfamiliar. It was almost like the thrill he got when he found a new ruin to lose himself in, some enormous city with rooms and rooms of old debris and life petrified.

As fast as his fins could carry him, he raced through the kelp, frightening fish and fauna into scurrying away from him until he saw the bubble column in the distance. He stopped to watch them scattered and drift upward in hundreds, pouring from something that looked like a willowy, slender starfish, flailing and sinking to the ocean floor until it was anchored in the sand by whatever had caught around its bottom limb. He guessed some poor creature had gotten trapped in more floating surface garbage and rolled his eyes. The water depth here was not much - he guessed around thirty feet - and clear as a bell. "Send out a signal. Let Brobot know our location," he said, and approached swiftly until he was treading in front of it with a raised eyebrow.

From the waist up, it looked like him, but it was skinny and pathetic, and he wondered how it got around with no flippers. Its hands were tight around its neck, scrabbling at the skin so hard with its fingernails that it had begun to bleed, and he narrowed his eyes. Knowing that the smell would attract sharks or worse, he reached out, thinking to stop it from whatever it was doing. His hand touched a soft wrist, and its eyes jerked open. For a moment, he was caught in their brilliant green terror-wonder, wonder-terror, vivid life that he could see flitting picture show shaky in its face, the pink flush of its skin a plea without words, and he watched its dark hair flip and turn around its face in the current. Then, it threw itself back from him, letting loose a muffled scream and a barrage of bubbles with it, looking even more panicked, mortified, and covered its mouth with its hands. He watched the bubbles rise to the surface before he looked back to it, eyes for a bare instant a green the color of nothing he'd ever seen before, a color that burned him, and then they were icing over, paling and growing film, losing the life. He put his hand out to touch its shoulder, maybe shake the film away, but its arms went limp and began to fall.

Then something clicked in his head, and his eyes widened. It was expelling air from its mouth, meaning it had to have taken air into itself at some point, meaning it couldn't have come from under water because there was no air to take in under water. His head snapped toward the surface, looking for something that wasn't there - because it _could not_ be there - before he forced himself to forget it. Taking an enormous breath and putting their lips together, he felt the human quiver and reach out, putting its fingers to his bare shoulders, clawing at him, bringing him in until they were tight together, sharing oxygen. They stayed that way until he thought it was safe to pull back and gave a delicate warning push at its chest. The human scrambled when it felt him draw away and tried to keep him close, but he pointed down to his robot, and it followed his finger with its gaze.

"Cal, cut the," he said, frowning, and squinting down at what was keeping the human from floating back up, "... giant fishing hook off its leg." The robot went to work, swimming to drift beside the iron chain twisted around its foot, and Dirk went back to giving the human his breath. Human. There was a human. Legs, feet, single set of lungs and all, and it would have died had he not been there to save it.

Where in the hell had a human come from? The world was a salt water waste, and everything was supposed to have changed to accommodate it, but here was a warm, trembling, land dwelling human struggling not to die in his arms. There was a snap of tension releasing when the chain broke, and he pushed away to give it some room to swim up and waited. Nothing happened. It floundered and bobbed, spitting bubbles and threatening to sink again. His mouth fell open in disbelief.

It couldn't swim.

He grabbed it under the arm and hauled it up as quickly as he could, holding his breath when they breached the surface in a white spray of water to give himself time to adjust to using his land lungs instead of his gills. The human coughed and gagged, clinging to him, and he wrapped an arm around its waist, turning in all directions and searching the horizon until he saw it. Not too far away, there was a tiny row boat, and he felt his blood pressure rising.

A row boat. "You brought a row boat into the middle of the ocean without knowing how to swim?" The twilight sun was blinding and painful in his eyes, but he had to swim toward it to get to the boat, so he signaled for Lil Cal to join him and grab his visor from his bag. "Kick your legs, human," he said, and it gave a pitiful attempt through its blubbering and gasping but only managed to thrash its feet uselessly against his fins, and he hissed. "Nevermind, stop." It went limp, shuddering for breath against his side, and he felt overwhelming pity for how helpless it seemed.

When he reached the boat and gently disengaged its arms from his neck, he put a hand at its soft posterior and helped push it over the edge, where it rolled onto its back and lay with its eyes closed for several minutes, making the most pitiable noises he had ever heard come from a living thing. He watched it, mesmerized at the living part for more reasons than one. A human. An actual human. It was worthless and pitiful with no fins in a world made of water and nearly dead, but it was beautiful and wondrous and nothing like he had ever imagined, read, or heard about in all his life. Even the records they had of original humans were vague. Seeing one, perceiving it as it lived in front of him, was like looking at a sun beam on a ripple and trying to make out shapes. He looked away and back again several times to be sure he wasn't hallucinating that it was there, though he'd just spent the last fifteen minutes of his life keeping it from drowning. No tail, no fins, no gills, nothing. Just pink, pale, green, black, lovely human colors and parts. Cal handed him his glasses from his bag, and he slid them on gratefully.

Then, the human sat bolt upright and nailed him to the prow of the boat with wide green eyes. "You're a blooming incubus!"

"I'm a _what_?" He stared incredulously, every other thought gone.

"You're an incubus! Why are you real? Why didn't you eat me? Why are you real, oh Christ, am I dying down there? Am I hallucinating before I die? I mean, that would be pretty dandy, to hallucinate about an incubus before death, but actually kind of terrifying. Great day in the morning, why do you speak English? English! I guess that would explain it, though, if you're not real. I'm hallucinating. Golly-o fuck does my neck hurt. Actually, my everything hurts, damn. Well, I guess if you're a hallucination, you're very handsome. Man, now I know you're a hallucination. An attractive incubus, an incubus at all, but a dashing blonde one with gold scales. Who ever heard of something so daft?" It seemed to run out of air then and collapsed back against the floor of the boat. Knowing it wouldn't hold his weight, he resisted the urge to rest against it and swam under, taking the opportunity to scout for sharks, but it didn't seem like they had attracted anything more than a few fish.

"In an attempt to salvage this conversation, though conversing with a human is as retarded a thing to say out loud as it is to think," he said when he surfaced and turned back to face the human, who was blinking stupidly up at him, "I'll try to answer your questions in order. I'm real because I am. That's a dumb question that I'm not going to waste time being philosophical on. I didn't eat you because I don't eat humans - another fantastic thing to say out loud because no one eats humans since they didn't previously exist in anyone's knowledge before this moment - and no, you didn't die; I worked damn hard to make sure of that. We both speak English, I assume, because we're in the same geographical region, and therefore our learning materials share an original source. Your neck hurts because you have at least one death wish and tried to claw through it, and yes I am a Grade A stunner in a coat of gold scales."

It was watching him now, looking as bewildered as he felt, but he was content to watch it right back, still having trouble accepting the situation. He hadn't realized he had traveled so far from the city, and he wondered if he would be able to find his way back at all, and knew he had obviously never been in those waters before. Though, that was the point, he guessed, to comb the farthest reaches of the ocean.

"Okay, so you're real," it breathed through soft pink lips, water dotted and shimmering under a skin of dried salt.

"Yes, human."

It sat up again and extended a hand. "I'm not a human. No, wait, I mean yes, I am. I am a human, but that's not my name. I'm Jake English."

He stared at the hand and raised his eyebrows. "Glad to see your hands work," he said.

"No," he laughed. His voice was hoarse and raspy. "Shake it with your hand. It's how humans greet each other." He was at a total loss but accepted the hand and gave it a shake.

"Dirk Strider. Gulfa who just saved your life, so don't call me an incubus again." He had a vague sense of what an incubus was, a legend even older than that of the humans, and it was not flattering.

The ocean was a dazzling field of red brilliance, cresting, falling, leaving the boat rocking softly while they watched each other without breath. This was a thing with a  human, and apparently it was also a thing with a gulfa because Jake seemed as floored to see him.

"Wow."

"No doubt," Dirk said.

"So you're really real."

"As anything else is."

Jake's face broke into a wide smile. "This is the greatest thing. I just wanted to do some exploring, but I never even  _thought_ \- the incubi, oops, gulfa, were just supposed to be a scary bed time story my grandma told me. I can't believe you're real! I suppose the succubus are real, too?"

"I have no idea what the fuck that is. Your terminology could use a lot of updating. About a million years' worth to be exact. A more important question is not why there is a sea dwelling creature on a planet made of water, but why there is a quadrupedal, finless human who cannot swim. Where did you come from?"

Jake seemed to consider it. "Man, I guess you're right when you put it like that. My village is about seven miles against the tide that way," he said, pointing, and Dirk turned to look. Brobot chose that moment to come to the surface beside them, and Jake's eyes went even wider.

"What the good hooping hell is that?" he asked, and Dirk cracked a smile at the language. Humans were weird. No, that was a weird thing to think.

"This is my robot. I built him."

"Under water?"

"Planet made of water, English. I guess you're still not grasping that concept. Mostly every other form of life adapted, so yes, these robots work under water, where I built them. Come to think of it, this actually explains why a lot of the human artifacts I find are still intact. A million years is probably too long ago an era from which I could have actually been finding working things."

"You found artifacts from the Old World?" It was fun to Dirk and a little reassuring that Jake was just as amazed by the things he said as he was by the things Jake said, but the sun was sinking, and he needed to find shelter before the night prowlers woke up. Face turning serious, he bent his head back in the direction Jake had pointed.

"Do you need some help getting back to your village? Skill as a swimmer notwithstanding, your arms don't look like they were made for rowing." Jake glared down at him, clearing his throat.

"I'll have you know I'm an excellent rower. Just because we weren't all born with fins - Christ on a Corndog, I'm sniping at an incubus."

"Gulfa."

"Right, sorry! SHIT, this is weird."

"I'm not entirely sure 'weird' covers it, but the feeling is mutual. I need an answer before it gets much darker here, though. Do you need help getting home or not?"

"But I have so much I want to ask you!"

He agreed wholeheartedly. "I have to be out of the open water before nightfall."

"Oh, then I...that would be appreciated, thank you." Dirk maneuvered himself toward the back of the boat and started to swim against the waves, but Jake kept him always in his line of sight, moving with him until he was lying on his stomach, head propped up on his elbows while he watched him.

"I'm not taking you all the way in, since I assume there are more humans. A village kind of implies more than one."

"Yeah, okay, there are a lot of us. That's probably wise." His gaze traveled downward for a second in thought before he looked up again. "Uh, Dirk?"

"Yes."

"I feel weird. This is like a dream, like it's not real."

"It's real." Jake perked and looked over Dirk's back to watch his fins swirl in the water.

"It is real."

"Yes. So, we're meeting again."

"We are. Good, great, it's real, and we'll meet again and talk and I'll ask you how you're here and how a lot of things and - okay, yes, but how will I ask you all that?"

"I'm leaving my Brobot with you." As soon as he said it, he knew it was the right thing to do. They could keep in touch and find each other through his robots. It was crazy and fast and ridiculous, but he had found a human, and he wanted to keep it. Brobot climbed into the boat beside Jake, and he frowned at it.

"Why doesn't it look like an inc- gulfa, and how do I use it?"

"I have to look at the gulfa all day. Making him look like a human was more exotic, but if you want something just ask him, and he'll do it. If anyone wonders where he came from, tell them you found him at sea. Just a stab in the dark here, but I'm guessing there are more human villages, so it could very well be something of theirs. That's how it's going to be played off." He was going to do it, keep a human. His heart was thumping.

"Okay. Oh, god. Oh, god this is real. I'm so excited."

"Good. Keep this quiet," he said, and Jake nodded vigorously. He could feel the water temperature change and knew he was in extreme shallows when he stopped the boat and saw a sparkling shoreline in the distance that was almost more surreal than finding a human had been. Lights and land and people with no fins, and they were all right there. A few hundreds of feet away from him were the figures of ancient history. "I'm stopping here," he said, feeling dazed. Jake looked at him with eyes that were almost starving, and he wondered if his eyes looked like that behind his glasses because he had found something magical, and he had to leave it. It was a secret already, he decided. He would never tell anyone that he had found a human. He didn't even want to think about it himself, about what that meant.

"So, I just ask him anything and he'll do it? Can I talk to you through him?"

"You can send me messages, but you need to have him in water. He wasn't programmed to transmit through air. They're both fluid, so it would probably work either way, but they're different mediums, and I'm not sure what the effect would be."

"Right. Keep him in water to chat." To chat with a human. How splendidly off. Voices from far away fell around them, wind-carried, chilly on Dirk's damp shoulders and climbing through the mess of Jake's loose, inky waves. They were calling for him. A band of humans, a whole crowd of them, who knew how many. Calling for one, a human who had nearly died, who he had saved, who he had given his life's breath to. The light was bright around the edges of Jake's face, silhouetting him and making him art. He was still alive, and he glowed, and he made dreams real just be being alive for an hour with Dirk.

"Bye, Jake."

"Goodbye, Dirk," he said, and he was so warm then that it seemed briefly that Dirk could feel his breath as steam on his face. Not a dying dream in shallow water, but a hot, vibrant boy made of secret possibility, something more dangerous than the Condesce to whisper about. He grabbed Jake's soft, slender fingers and ran them between his own just to feel them, giving them a squeeze, and having the beat of a human heart against his palm, proof that he could touch. This had happened, was happening still, and he shook his head, releasing his grip, and dove back into the water without another word. His hands pulled his glasses from his face, and he handed them to Lil Cal, hot after him, and tried to rid himself of the feeling that he was asleep. When he opened his mouth to tell Cal to transmit the coordinates for the shelter from Brobot, he noticed how different his voice was under water, how it carried when Jake's had been muffled, and how loud it must have sounded in the open air. He exhaled shakily, reminding himself to use his gills again because he was thinking of the way his voice had sounded to human ears.

Humans. Incredibly beautiful, tiny, stupid, helpless humans. They were real, had been real all along, and a million years hadn't seen them all vanished. He was still awed when a thought occurred to him, and he remembered why he had been so far out in the wastes in the first place: the Condesce's mission. He descended through the black, brushing fingers of the kelp forest and stopped in his tracks, watching lazy little fish settling where they would for the night.

"Oh, shit."

Lil Cal's eyes flashed a bright, agreeing blue in the dark water beside him.


	2. The Difference Between Depth and Rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so sorry to have kept everyone waiting for so long and especially to everyone on tumblr who kept getting lied to about when it was going to be posted.

 

_Red mouth boy,_

_and gold tongue taut,_

_speak as masculine_

_as I ought._

_But who_

_to say if I am true?_

 

There was a quiet then which felt like a living thing, eerie and cloistering in its solemnity where the water quit bothering the tiny-sanded stones and jagged rock garden of a beach cut into black shadow lines and white grains that, a million years ago, might have been a city, a mother, a bone, a building, a wish that lived in a body, but now was just one long stretch of bleached grit slipping its way into the slick-slimed crevices between boulders on the deserted back of an island whose air felt warm and weighty as sleepers' eyes. The boat rode up on the shore, the shallow water ink on one side and blood on the other, and he stepped out with his legs shaking and his vision blurry. His skin was itching under the salt, and his hands couldn't decide whether to fist in his hair, rub the aching sores on his neck, or scratch at something. They did nothing, like his breath. It came and it went, and it did nothing, and he turned his eyes to watch the kaleidoscope sunset winking at him through the slurry lines of viridian cloud. He still felt like he wasn't getting any air, was drowning at the bottom of a cracked crystal bottle full of blue and gold and white, and he grabbed the rough lip of the boat and hauled it up onto the rocks where the waves wouldn't carry it away before he got another chance to climb back in and kick away from the shore to plunge out of his depth in dream stuff.

The sopping sleeves of his jacket were strangling and cold, so he pulled at a cuff and struggled out of it altogether with shaky arms, brown muscles tense and cramping. That he had almost died made the pain wonderful but intensive, and he ran pruning fingers up his arm, testing the flesh for reality before he dropped the jacket, ripped to ruins anyway from all his thrashing around with the fishing chain, into the bottom of the boat with a squelch, feeling the cold wash spray his ankles. He turned to face the west, in the direction of the noise of dock porter's loud voice over the P.A. system calling out the names of the anchoring ships to eager families who waited for their sailors to find them safely on the beach.

The robot clinked beside him, stepping out to find purchase on the sandy patches between rocks, and Jake turned to admire the hard gleam of the sun on its polished edge. He didn't need Dirk to tell him this was real. He believed it anyway now that he had time to focus on it, on how wonderful it was, but that didn't keep it from making him nervous. Everything in the world was smeared like watery paint running to the bottom of a wide blue canvas, and he swore under his breath for losing his glasses in the ocean. His grandmother would kill him, but as he approached the levee, finding his way through the rocks and hopping one-footed to peel his soaking shoes off one-by-one so that he could curl his toes in the blessedly hot sand, he wished it had been the first thing on his mind instead of the last.

The levee loomed high and formidable in front of him, an enormous metal wall running all the way around the city, topped with razor wires and electric wires and slow spinning beacons on posts that lit up red and squealed when the tides rose too high. Or they were supposed to, anyway. According to his grandmother, it had been generations before she was born that the tides had last risen so high, and the beacons had been quiet ever since. Some of the inner-city dwellers were dubious of its effectiveness, suspicious that the levee was broken or electrified, and wouldn't touch it, but insisted that the officials force Crockercorp to make sure it was working. The officials ensured everyone that it worked fine, and Crockercorp wasn't bothered to do anymore to keep up the levee than they ever had. They had built it, after all; they were entitled to do what they liked with it, which meant little more to them than replacing the occasional beacon post.

Jake didn't care what the inner-city dwellers thought about the wall. He'd been sneaking his way around it all his life. In the dark, his fingers could find the metal gaps where panels met poles and stones, and the parts he could fit his feet in to get purchase, could twist his body to get through the perfect coils of barbed wire without a scratch usually, and he knew very well that it wasn't electrified. If it had been, he'd still have climbed it because scaling the levee wall gave him a thrill. He felt dangerous and giant with gasoline blood lit to an all encompassing inferno by the unruly scarlet spark of adventure inside him when he slid down the other side, feet crunching in soft sand or ocean glass. He was supposed to use his personal ID, punch the number into a panel at the designated entries and exits when he wanted passage, but he could never remember it, and passage was only allowed if he could get clearance, which he didn't have. His grandmother had a trader's clearance, and island fishermen had an active clearance which let them come and go as they liked without having to enter their IDs every time, but he was just a boy. Fishers, traders, and Crocker representatives all had active clearance, but everyone else had to enter their IDs when they wanted to leave. Because the world population was so low, constrained by the water to areas of high elevation like the mountains, each country kept careful track of its citizens and held the others at strict responsibility for their safety if they left to tour or visit a college. Jake couldn't wait until he was old enough to learn a trade at a college.

"What's your name?" he asked the robot, squinting at it in the low light. _Brobot_ ran across its visor in jagged scripted, red, pixel letters that he could barely make out. The language might have sounded the same when Dirk spoke it, but he guessed the alphabet had become more different from theirs over time. "Very good to meet you, Brobot. I suppose that would be your name. That's what Dirk called you, after all. Don't mind me, I'm still taking it all in. Er, I hate to ask, since we've only just met and it seems like a silly question, but might you be able to see the gate from here?" He turned to look at the levee and couldn't make out where the wall stopped and the gates began. His eyes were drawn instead to the monolithic black body of the lighthouse extending proudly into the sky from the center of the city. Built and tended by Crockercorp, of course, as they had a hand in anything massive, crucial, or technological, and for the last several hundred years had been pioneers in revolutionizing civilized society, bringing scattered humanity not only out of the dark ages to live easily, but giving them hope that they could thrive and expand. He had heard tell that there was even a floating city anchored to the ocean floor somewhere out there, construction sponsored by Crockercorp, and just the idea made him dizzy with thrill. Jane told him it wasn't as incredible as he built it up to be in his head, and the thought of the stout-hearted young heiress to the company, whose innovations improved safety and comfort for their entire race, sobered him. With a secretive glance at Brobot, he doubted even they could have made this dream a reality, though their inexhaustible resources would probably boast otherwise.

It gave him a thumbs-up, and he bowed in return. "After you, then, Brobot," he said as it passed him and let the gentle glow of the visor lights on its silver skinned shoulders guide him in toward the levee gates.

After the destruction of the Old World, there was the sky and the sea and not much else, so they called what was left of it Skaia because they'd had enough of the sea, and when he looked up, hearing the unhappy squawk of a gull flying over head, he let himself be dazed by the violet swirl of the sky and wondered how anyone could ever get enough of either. The misty blue bodies of ships loomed on the horizon, each one no doubt built by Crockercorp but outfitted with a Skaianet engine, heading for the docks on the western side of the island, and he barely made them out as they all came in for the night. When he reached the wall, he hit the buzzer and waited for the heavy doors to clank open and slide apart.

Past the initial entrance of the levee was a breaker room with a watertight, sealed hatch at the back wall and shiny, grated floors that trapped the water when it leaked in through the open door at high tide. The doors slid shut and locked behind him, and he blinked away the sudden brightness of the room. The portly old man in uniform behind the desk looked up and lifted his bushy eyebrows when Jake came in, and he felt relief to his core. "Jake! What a nice surprise. You actually used the gate his time around." He laughed nervously and pushed his hands in his pockets to fish for his card, hoping it hadn't been carried away like his glasses. "Who's your friend?"

"Robowood." he flubbed anxiously, then cringed. "No, sorry. Driftwood robot. I found it in the water. Just...drifting. Drifting along. Yep, just a drifty sort of tin gentleman out there in the ocean," he said, kicking himself for being such an awful liar. The man's mouth hung agape, and Jake shuffled uncomfortably.

"Oh, buddy. Jake, you're not supposed to be in the water without a permit. What if a shark had found you? Or an eel. Or worse'n that. Playing on the beach is one thing, but going in the water is serious business." He waggled his finger in Jake's direction, and he picked nervously at a pants pocket, thinking about the giant sharks and the eels, and the 'or worse.' His tongue stuck like glue to the roof of his mouth, and he decided he wanted 'worse,' so he nodded instead and felt easy with the quietness of the lie.

"I...know. Sorry, Otis, but it's all spiffing now, isn't it? I'm safe and sound and rather coldto be quite honest, and I seem to have misplaced my ID card, so couldn't I just be allowed to go home for the evening, and you find it in your heart to overlook this whole debacle?" Otis rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair, fiddling with the buttons on the blinking panel behind him. A confirmation appeared on a screen, and he hit a final key before the room began to depressurize. Jake grinned at him, thankful he'd spent his days making friends with the gate keepers rather than the children his own age and grabbed Brobot's wrist. "Thanks, Otis!" he said, darting down the tunnel the door swung open to reveal. 

"Yeah, yeah. You better tell your grandma I want me some of her pumpkin pie for all this trouble!" he shouted after them, and Jake chortled, nudging Brobot conspiratorially in the shoulder.

"Come on, I'm going to show you to this terrific gal I know. She'll never believe this!" And, really, he was counting on it. Though he'd promised Dirk he would keep their meeting a secret, he knew he would burst if he had to go without telling anyone at all, and Jane was just skeptical enough to wave something like that off without much consideration. She didn't believe what she didn't see, which was perfect.

She'd never see a thing, his secret would never have to be more than grand fantasy to her, and he could keep an incubus all for his own. Thinking of his pacific home high up and built deep within the overgrown wilderness of the mountainside - overlooking the city from just far enough away that he couldn't be a part of it but could smell it when the rain broke against the rows of metal houses and watch while the ant mothers carried their children indoors because more water was always a nuisance - he felt a twinge of regret and truly _wanted_ something he could keep all for his own. He wanted thisto keep for his own, this adventure, because even as they stepped toward the opposite hatch and he turned to see the first close and seal behind them, siphoning all the light back inside the breaker room before the slender yellow streak of it dwindled to nothing and left them in darkness, the eagerness of possibility dragged blunt nails down his back and tugged him with an unshakable grip to go and find that boat again, get in the water, and row until something with gold fins and life breath pulled him under. The hatch popped open with a long hiss, and the iridescent red of the floating street lamps glared in his tender eyes as they bobbed lazily, spinning here and there as they would.

Brobot's visor dimmed. It hummed mechanically under its shell, falling in step behind Jake, and couldn't be coaxed to join him at his side again. So, he settled for reaching back with a hand to grab its wrist because he needed to touch, to know, to feel through a flesh and iron union that it was all still happening.

The inner city dwellers were bleak. Only water over an island was a nuisance; water over the ocean was depth.

The deep blue stone of the streets was cast black with night, and it was broken here and there by puddles of sharp white moonlight by the time he reached Scholar's Way, emptied of all the people whose nearby doors and windows he could hear closing as they retreated into their tall, slender homes and called the day done. From the city center, past the chaotic labyrinth of uneven roads built up with slipshod buildings and cluttered side streets, the lighthouse beacon spun slowly, throwing brilliant red arms out across the water to guide wayward seafarers in, but he avoided going nearer to it than he absolutely needed, and stuck to the outer edges of the city, following the levee wall. Closer to the lighthouse, to the cluster of skyscrapers around it - Crock Corp's business offices - maintenance droids and automatic patrols swarmed like ants, so he avoided it because the last thing he needed was to be caught without his ID and have to find his way through the forest even later than he already would by being detained. It gave him the opportunity to look at the colleges, too, all of them hundreds of years old and carved from dusty rose and white marble, lined up handsomely beside each other with kept yards full of flowerbeds and long banners sewn with trade emblems hanging from the ornate entablatures sitting on their high colonnades. There were four impressive campuses, two to either side of the road, and each of them was quiet and empty for the evening except for the Crockercorp campus and the Skaianet campus, his grandmother's, which sat directly across from each other and seemed to be issuing constant challenge. That's how Harleys and the Crockers were locked in time, forever, challenging each other.

As he was the future heir to their empire, and Jane the future heiress of hers, people whispered unkindly about their friendship, speculating treachery loudly enough that it kept them from interacting in public.

Even without his glasses, he could pick out the austere green skull in the center of the black banner of the Skaianet campus and the threatening crimson trident on the blue length of the Crockers' across the way.

His grandmother told him constantly that he needed to do what he thought was best for himself as far as his education went, that she would gladly find and train someone else to head up the company when she passed on, but he knew his grandmother. She was too eager, forgetful as himself, and overly willing to put her faith in people for that to end up well, and while the Crockers weren't bad by nature they were shrewd businessmen who knew how to get what they wanted, and they wanted Skaianet's assets broken up. Jake knew he couldn't trust some stranger with his grandmother's legacy if he wanted to keep it safe. No, he'd end up choosing a business school somewhere, and he'd get to leave the island for a few years to study before he had to come back and live the rest of his life as a Chief Executive Overseer Whatever Boring Blah Blah as long as it meant all her years of hard work weren't wasted.

He passed the school of archeology, not his family's or Jane's but an independent place of learning where opportunity lie, and he watched it hungrily as he went, envious of everyone who could live their lives without their every arbitrary decision dragging them into a game of political intrigue, and turned to see Brobot watching the road expressionlessly, easily keeping up without a sound. At least he would have this adventure before all was said and done, and that was more than he'd ever imagined. No, it wasn't more than he had imagined; he did quite a lot of imagining, but it was more than he ever imagined would really happen.

They took a hard right when they reached the end of the road, and the green lawns of the campuses shrank away until they became a smooth path of well-tended bitumen winding tumultuously on and up through the sparse beginnings of the forest, kept trimmed and tidy inside the city. In the darkness, Jake could barely make out the ground, and he squinted, using Brobot for balance more than he was guiding it now. The road sloped suddenly upward, and he stumbled, hissing when he landed hard on his knees. "Jiminy fucking Cricket," he swore, using his hands to brush the dirt away and rising to his feet. "You couldn't shed some light here, could you?" he asked.

Without pause, Brobot's visor flared, and Jake flinched, shielding his eyes with a hand and glaring out from under his fingers while his eyes adjusted. "Woah..." The path was illuminated all the way through the trees, to the end of the levee wall, and he could see the highest spire of the Crocker home peeking out of the branches in the distance. Impressed, he clapped Brobot on the back. "Well, now I can't _wait_ to see what other fantastic things you get up to."

It didn't respond, and Jake took the lead again, wrapping his hand around its wrist and effortlessly picking his way through every long-shadowed dip and pebble on the path until he was standing at the thick metal gates to the Crocker estate.

Intimidating, polished, and black, they stood edge to edge with jagged teeth chewing at each other in the middle, overlooked by two large turrets which had automatically targeted him. With the stern, red bulb of an eye, it stared at him expectantly, and he pressed his hand to the cool square. It only took a moment to scan his palm print and recognize him, then the eye blinked from red to green, clearing his entrance with a happy chirrup, and the turrets turned their aim back to the path, spinning in lazy half-circles. The door's teeth disentangled themselves and pulled back into the solid fence posts, allowing him just enough time to pass inside before they were clamping shut on his heels. The drifting garden lamps of the Crocker Estate's lavish front lawn were bare spots of color in the light field from Brobot's visor. "You can turn your lights off now."

The world went instantly dark, and for a moment Jake was blind except for the soft glow of the lamps before his sight returned, and he rubbed at an eye. A long walkway paved out of rich red mulch unfolded under his feet, decorated along the sides with grotesque sculptures, some supposedly humorous according to Jane's grandfather, and some intended to be artistic according to Jane herself. They were carved out of some imported, lacquered stone, and in the moonlight they looked unearthly - monsters the way they appeared in nightmares rather than in the thick underbrush of the mountain forests - all gathering together across the rolling acres of sweet green grass and the wisp of dusky sand Jake could make out toward the back of the manor, where he knew their private lagoon to be. Brobot stirred, pressing ahead of him, and reached over its shoulder to withdraw a slender, gleaming blade from a slot behind its neck protectively. Jake furrowed his eyebrows when it refused to let him pass again or cntinue forward, after trying for some minutes, and huffed. "If you continue being stupid, I'll be forced to give you an ungentlemanly what-for," he said, putting up his fists for a fight. It turned to face him, and Jake froze, suddenly remembering that he was threatening what was an unknown piece of machinery from the sea, wielding a discouraging sword and unenumerated, unexplored abilities. It reached toward him, and he took a nervous step backward, faltering in his conviction, but the hand caught him anyway and only rested awkwardly against his chest.

Jake waited for it to do something else, but it didn't move, and the extended silence and heavy weight of the arm became increasingly uncomfortable until he hazarded carefully pushed it off his shoulder. For a moment there was relief, but then the arm was back, and from the ridged socket of Brobot's underarm came another, leaving Jake to gape. The first hand resumed its position on his shoulder, and he knocked it away again while watching the second like a hawk. It did him little good because it came back, gripped him hard enough to be painful, and held him in place while the second coiled around his waist, pinning his arms against his side, and a third sprouted behind it, reaching toward him until it found its way under his shirt and spread its fingers across an unnaturally wide stretch of skin to prod at several of the sensitive pressure points along his spine.

He grit his teeth and struggled to free himself, swearing a blue streak and feeling more than appropriately hot under the collar when a fourth arm sneaked its way into his still-damp shorts, testing his anatomy. When a cold, metal finger brushed over the inside of his thigh, he kicked as hard as he could. "H-hey, now, none of that business, you frinkly fucking perverted tin can. Let me go. Let me _go_ , damn it."

The sound of feet had him craning his neck to see around Brobot, and the sight of Jane Crocker's drone escort had never been so welcome. He sighed in relief but continued to squirm, hoping maybe he could manage to get away without needing to be rescued by her and her own droid horde. Unfortunately, Jake thought as she neared and Brobot swiveled his head around to watch, he had never been lucky. The arms holding him retreated at least, and he immediately went to straightening his rumpled clothing before she could see him, but when he tried to get by and meet her, he was denied again. Brobot positioned itself in front of him, thrusting out the hand still wielding the sword, and when the drones were less than thirty feet away, he watched them simultaneously come to a dead halt before moving to form a barrier around Jane.

"Boys, back in line, please," Jake heard her say. She shuffled around behind them, and he saw her deliver a hard kick to a thick metal leg after a long moment of being ignored. It didn't budge or even register the kick, and she lifted up onto her toes to peek between the spaces at them. "Jake?"

He was still dealing with his own insubordinate robot, always coming just short of maneuvering around it whenever he thought he was nearly free. "Sorry, Jane, I don't know what the devil is wrong with these damned tinker toys."

"When exactly did you come into possession of a personal assistance droid, Jake?"

"An incubus gave him to me this afternoon. After - you know." The drones cut him off. 

" **ENGAGE THREAT.** "

"Woah! What?" she yelled. Jake's breath hung in his throat, and his eyes darted away from Jane to find the faces of all six menacing Crocker droids glaring at him with sharp, gleaming spikes built out of their shells and wide war limbs on ball hinges that said more about what they were made for than the innocuous Crocker Fork painted on their chests. There was a low, whining whistle, and a trail of red lights burned to life along their sides, catching on the reflective blade of Brobot's sword.

"Fucks and bumblebees, put away your weapon!" he shouted, tugging at Brobot's elbow. They leered down at him from behind angry, narrow slits for eyes, and he faltered, knowing what happened to people when one of Jane's robot guardians designated them a threat to her life, but before he could scramble for an excuse or a gun that he didn't have, it targeted Brobot. The droids raised their closed fists, and the thin panels covering their frames lifted and folded back against the arms so Jake could see the hot eye of their weapon systems winking ominously from inside the hollow left behind, firing up to attack. His eyes went wide, and he froze in shock, but Brobot dashed. With lightning speed, it slashed sideways through one drone and leapt high into the air and spun, slicing through two more like butter before landing behind them to crouch in front of Jane, just as paralyzed with shock as he was. The three which had been demolished spluttered and collapsed in on themselves, but the others rounded on Brobot, discharging their cannons into open air and blasting several of the yard sculptures as they did, disintegrating them into gravelly dust with an enormous 'boom.' Brobot was still too quick, and it cut a loud-clanging gash upward through the chest of one, drew its blade back downward to sever the head of another, and crookedly through the center of the last before Jake even had time to blink. His eyes were glued to the separate pieces of the Crocker droids as they slipped to the floor, leaving whatever was left of them to crumple into a heap of sparking ruin.

Jane stared slack-jawed at Brobot, and it slipped the blade seamlessly into its neck again, finally drawing Jake's attention away from the mess. A smile so big it almost hurt spread from cheek to cheek. "That was the coolest thing I've ever seen," he cheered. Jane's brow furrowed, and she sidestepped the wreckage, eying Brobot warily before hurrying to Jake, who met her half way and pulled her in for an enthused hug that she cautiously returned.

"I don't think my father will think so. These drones are very expensive to make, you know, but at the very least this solves the mystery of the bright light I saw from my window."

He cringed. "Oh, right. I didn't think about that, but come on, Jane. Really, how often is it you come upon the opportunity to see such sport?"

"Never," she said, loosening her arms from around Jake's neck and glancing back suspiciously at Brobot, who was now scanning the ruination he'd left of her escort. If she had ever cared for her robots, Jake thought, she might be more angry, but for everyone else in the city who hated them and called their presence a nuisance, Jane hated them twice as much. Learning to avoid them had left her very sneaky.

"Where is your father anyway?"

"He's gone to the flight hangar to make arrangements for the trip."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot you were leaving for the southern islands. You're so lucky you always get to go on these grand adventures whenever you want."

She smiled softly and rolled her eyes, tucking a short lock of dark hair behind her ear. "I've told you many times, Jake, that you're welcome to come with us if you wanted. Poppop loves you, you know. He wouldn't have a problem with it. You're the only young man who takes fun in willingly sitting through his doddery - and quite silly - film collection." He shrugged and gave her a passive grin, knowing he could never actually go with her to visit the islands where her family's factories turned out hundreds of pieces of Crocker tech by the hour. They were mostly business trips, he knew that, but it was still terribly exciting to Jake, who had never been on an aeroplane or seen any island or continent other than his own.

"No shame in enjoying a good film, Jane. Mr. John is a top notch gentleman to share," he trailed off, watching Brobot bend down to sift through the broken parts, and cleared his throat. "What are you going to tell your father about this?"

"I'll tell him...that they malfunctioned and killed one another. With all the recent issues the drones have been having, I'm sure he'll believe me without too much questioning. I'll probably have to do a thousand safety drills after this, though. I'm not looking forward to that in the least," she sighed. "But I guess there's no use crying over spilled milk. Are you hungry? Would you like to come inside for dinner? You can tell me all about where you came across your droid. Did your grandmother build it? It's not a Crocker model."

"I already told you, Jane. An incubus gave it to me. Nearly killed me, too." Just as he'd hoped, she waved him off as overly imaginative and focused on the part that put an uneasy stress in her lean shoulders.

"Oh, Jake. Were you out at sea again? That's so unwise. I've seen that rowboat. It's only a matter of time before it springs a leak and leaves you stranded. I wish you'dn't go to such lengths to satisfy your boredom. My door is always open, you know?"

He wrinkled his nose; her idea of fun was tossing things in an oven and sleuthing around, worrying her father until the timer went off, which wasn't all that bad, but he was a terrible cook and didn't have the patience for mysteries unless they could be solved within ninety minutes, on a silver screen, just before the credits rolled. "Thanks, but a true explorer never turns his back when he hears the call of adventure."

"How about dinner, then? Have you heard that call today?" she asked eagerly, the hope that he might finally accept the invitation bright in her eyes, and he was suddenly painfully aware of how hungry he was.

"No. but it'll have to wait. I don't want my grandma to start worrying about me. You wouldn't happen to have any Pez, though, would you?" She groaned and shook her head.

"You won't let me cook for you, but you'll take candy - candy which you could get at your _own_ house, and which I am not supposed to have in mine on penalty of being a dissenter - right in front of me? I'm beginning to wonder if I should feel insulted." Reaching into the breast pocket of her dress, she pulled out a fat, orange wand with a muffin cap and pulled back on the top of it. He smiled broadly at her and stuck his hand out to catch the tiny pieces of rainbow candy that fell out, popping them into his mouth with a pleased hum and a crunch as he bit down. Not even the Crockers could resist the appeal of Pez. "Agh! Don't _chew_ them, Jake. You're supposed to suck. They're hard candy."

He laughed. "My grandmother is the one who makes them; I think I know how they're eaten, Missus." The words ran dry, and they were left to stand awkwardly with only the low chirping of crickets in the nearby woods and ocean waves landing like a lover's kisses on the shell of the lagoon, out of sight, looking away from each other until Jake's crunching became unbearable enough that he forced himself to swallow the rest of the unchewed mouthful painfully and tugged at his collar. "Er, well...I best be going."

She nodded, running her hands over the hem of her skirt to flatten it, though it was ironed to perfect flatness. "You had best."

When they each stepped in for a goodbye hug, they turned their cheeks together, bringing their faces too close, and Jake felt Jane's lips accidentally brush his. He panicked and hurriedly stepped off, apologizing profusely to her, but she was busy doing the same, so he barely heard what she was saying.

"Enjoy your trip," he finished, unable to look at her.

"You too."

"I'm not going on a trip."

"Right, no. I know. To your home, I meant."

"Oh, yeah," he laughed nervously. "I will. Let's go, Brobot." Jane pocketed the Pez dispenser, and Jake debated going in for another hug until realizing it would make the situation even more uneasy than it already was and turned away. Just as he reached the gate, he heard her call out to him and looked back. Thunder thudded in the distance between them, but still far enough away that he knew he would be home well before he saw a single drop of rain.

"Leave the lights turned off. You can see them from a mile away," she shouted. He lifted his fingers, curled them into guns, and pretended to shoot her, winking though he knew she couldn't see the gesture from so far away. She'd know he'd done it because it was what he did. Then he left.

The levee was only built around the inner city, and at the end of the bitumen path was a heavy set of doors untended enough that he didn't need his ID to pass through them into the lush, green forest it barely kept out. Sticking his foot between the lose edges of two stones in the wall, he grabbed a fistful of ropy vines, clinging to them, and pulled himself up, trying not to think about how sticky his relationship with Jane had become. With Brobot on his heels, he didn't need her advice to know better than to draw in every growling, prowling predator of the night by switching on a spotlight to signal where he was. As quietly as he could, he twisted through the mangled razor wire at the top of the wall and dropped down the other side, waiting until Brobot did the same before beginning to feel his way familiarly through the overgrown foliage and fallen limbs on the broken path.

There were shortcuts in the jungle; pathways through dilapidated ruins that had been chiseled right into the base of the mountain in a last ditch effort to keep the wild out by whoever had tried to inhabit it in the past, before they realized that there was no keeping the jungle out. It invited itself in because that was its home, and it did not need or ask permission to go where it liked. His grandma had learned that before he was born, and even attempting it was wasting energy, so they found a balance, an easy cohabitation. For as long as he could remember, it was commonplace to wake up to some hulking, toothy beast peeking its head in through his window and blowing reeking breath into his room interestedly. Instead of trying to keep them out, she built invisible walls around their home that felt full of fear to a wild animal, made them leery of approaching, and broadcast complex wave signals to calm them using technology he'd never understood, too advanced and dependent on the difficult minutia of science that only someone as brilliant as his grandmother could have mastered or utilized at all. She wasn't one for harming the animals, anyway, she'd always said.

That was admirable, he thought, but he still preferred to keep a rifle or three on hand in case that technology failed. Nothing beat a six-shooter cylinder full of bullets for reliability.

Brobot was so light on his feet that Jake occasionally felt the need to check for certainty's sake that it was still there until they were pushing their way through the last ring of tough ferns growing on the outside of the Harley property. Where other families had a plot of land around their home or a street, something simple, theirs was bedded in a long tangle of vines; rows and rows of vegetables and fruit bearing trees all unblemished and left alone to get fat and healthy by the animals. More of his grandmother's doing.

The air was sweet and perfumed with the smell of them, and as he passed a heavy-laden tree with low branches, he pulled off a plump, pink piece of fruit and bit into it, feeling the tart juice drip down his chin. His whole body ached with delighted approval, and he hummed from the simple pleasure. Most of the islanders had never tasted anything like what came from his family's private orchard. Theirs was all ready-made food pre-handled and packaged by Crocker corp for mass consumption. Of course, they had fruits and vegetables, too, but it was all sallow and weak looking, grown too quick and too hard in a lab just so people had something cheap and fast to eat. The garden was their secret, and if anyone other than Jane bothered speaking to him he'd have made sure to keep it that way, but he was saved the trouble by being unpopular and intimidating to his peers.

A few hundred feet above him, resting on a reliable shelf of rock, was their home, an impressive manor that rivaled the Crockers' own, but a few yards ahead his grandmother's workshop stood proudly out of the knotted mess of the pumpkin patch surrounding it, a wide, hollow sphere resting on a column of similar square stones thick enough to support and house a staircase that lead upward into it. White light leaked from the windows and the entrance to the staircase, and he sneaked by quietly, hearing her humming to herself as she tinkered away at some new invention or other. Probably something silly like the Pez she was so fond of. She liked the idea that she could have candy, cartoons, and the brightly colored heads of plastic animals all in one place: her coat pocket.

By the time they had reached the door, he was tossing the fruit pit into the grass and sucking the juice from his fingers greedily, now more eager for dinner after having reminded himself how delicious food was and how long it had been since he'd had any. He guided Brobot through the disaster area of their den, cluttered with his grandmother's science paraphernalia, piles of guns, movie cases, plush dolls, shelves stocked with jars full of preserved food, framed posters of actors and actresses he had secretly pilfered from the cinema in the city, and Pez dispensers. If he were Jane, he'd probably try to be a better host and give Brobot a tour of the house right away or worry about cleaning up, but he didn't care to bother with that, too hungry and tired and ready to sit down and let his cramping muscles relax. He stepped onto the transportalizer in the middle of the room and had to kick a doll off to make space for Brobot, pulling it in by its fingers to stand beside him.

"Bedroom." He felt the electric crackling in all his limbs that told him he was in the hallway leading to their rooms, and he tugged Brobot quickly down the cold length of the hall, smacking the button on the wall to open his door without stopping. The smell of popcorn hit him immediately, and he flushed with embarrassment, rushing to shove the bowl to the side of his bed for later cleaning, trying to forget how he'd run out earlier when he had been eager to keep moving to distract himself from thinking about how badly the afternoon watching movies with Jane had gone. "Alright, so this is my bedroom. You can sleep and hang out and do whatever you want, but just stay here until I can tell my Grandma that you're here. These," he pulled it over to the wall behind his bed, plastered with as many movie posters as he could steal from the cinema, "Are my favorite movies. Do the gulfa have movies?" Brobot didn't answer but began moving around the room, lifting and obsvering things. Jake took it as a good sign. "Okay, I'm going to go now. Don't leave this room under any circumstances," he said. Brobot continued to go on about inspecting a snowglobe it had picked up from Jake's desk, so he made his way back out of the room, locking the bedroom door, and leaving the house. He followed the mountain path back down to the workshop and kept checking over his shoulder to be sure Brobot hadn't followed him until his foot was resting on the bottom step of the staircase, and he covered his mouth with a hand, snickering at the muffled sounds of his grandmother singing very badly out of tune. Straightening his face, he took them two at a time and rapped a fist against the empty door frame when he hit the landing to see her bending over a desk with her back to him.

She turned with a wide smile and pushed her goggles up into her hair. "Jake." She stretched her arms high above her head, and he listened to her groan at her joints popping. With a pleased 'phew!,' she settled back against the desk, and her eyes cut to the window. She blinked in surprise. "Wow, I didn't realize how dark it had gotten outside; you're home really late. Just where did you go?" He shrugged and looked away, shuffling over to lean against her desk.

"I went to Jane's house." It wasn't a total lie. She raised an eyebrow.

"You didn't eat any of that nasty Crocker food, did you?"

"Of course. Not a single, solitary bite, and I'm starving."

She smiled and bobbed her head playfully at him, reaching under the table to pull out a half-empty bag of marshmallows and a Bunsen burner. "I think we can fix that. Go grab that pot of soup from the fridge. I'm finished for the night," she said, diving back down under the counter and rifling through the contents of the cabinet, and he launched himself around the edge with renewed vigor to rush at the short refrigerator on the other side of the room. They were going to have a movie night. A blast of cold air rolled over him when he pulled the door open, and his shoulders sagged at how incredible it felt. "If you get the screen, I'll get the blankets," she called, and he stuffed his hand through the maze of chemical bottles and petri dishes to carefully extricate the tin foil covered pot of soup. He pushed the fridge shut with his heel and carried it over to sit on the burner flame, beside a box of graham crackers and a package of chocolate pieces that made him giddy to see.

"Don't even think about touching that chocolate before you eat dinner," she said, scrounging around in the closet for the bedding, and he stuck his tongue out at her back, resigning himself to pulling down the screen on the opposite wall, rolling her projector around until the picture was big enough to see without his glasses, and pushing a video inside to play. The opening music was just beginning when she approached with the blankets and snapped one open to shake the dust free and spread it out on the floor.

 

"Here, take this one. The marshmallow is perfectly melty," she said, maneuvering the warm s'more out of the burner flame and over to him with a pair of tongs, which he grabbed and crunched into gratefully, feeling chocolate smear at the corners of his lips. The movie was more than half over, and the basic soup they'd had for dinner had been the most delicious thing he could remember ever eating. Every bone in his body felt weak as puddy, and he didn't think he ever wanted to move again, sinking his face into his stack of pillows and resisting the temptation to close his eyes.

"You're the best in the whole world."

"Duh. What good are grandmas if not to give up the good s'mores?" He agreed. " _So_ ," she started. He lifted his head to look at her. "Did she try to kiss you again?"

"Grandma..." he groaned, dejectedly burying his face in the pillow pile again.

"What? What did I say?"

"She didn't frigging try to kiss me this afternoon. We bumped into each other purely by mistake. I told you we were only trying to get popcorn at the same time."

"That's close enough to kissing to count."

"No, it's not, Grandma. No more of this cock-and-bull about me and Jane kissing or any such. _Please_."

"Alright, mister grumpy pants, if you say so."

"Thank you. Now, shush. This is the best part." He heard her laugh quietly, but it was just barely registered as background noise, unlike the long fingernails that reached over to scratch his scalp, and he let himself be absorbed in the film and the comfort, unable to fight the already overwhelming desire for sleep much longer with a full belly, a warm bed, and her fingers playing with his hair.

In the morning, when he scrambled to get back to the house as quickly as he could, remembering that he'd left Brobot all alone with everything he owned in the world, it was too late. His room was a disaster of knocked over furniture and disarray, and in the middle of the mess of blankets, posters, and movie cases was Brobot looking entirely too pleased with himself.


End file.
